Frequently joined tables and indexes are placed so that as they are requested from file storage, they can be retrieved in parallel from separate disks simultaneously.
Frequently accessed tables and indexes are placed on separate disks to balance I/O and prevent read queuing.
Tuning the DBMS can involve setting the recovery interval (time needed to restore the state of data to a particular point in time), assigning parallelism (the breaking up of work from a single query into tasks assigned to different processing resources), and network protocols used to communicate with database consumers.
Frequent transaction log backups are smaller, so they interrupt database activity for shorter periods of time.
Accurate and updated statistics allow query engines to make good decisions about execution plans, as well as efficiently locate data.